By Natalie Geddes

Weather radar down during storm in southern Saskatchewan

Jun 3, 2011 | 6:26 AM

While southern Saskatchewan was looking at a number of severe weather warnings Thursday, Environment Canada said one of their radar stations was down.

Tornado watcher Greg Johnson posted the problem up on Twitter.

“It wasn’t working and that was kind of scary,” said Johnson.

Instead of the usual green and blue indications of rain, the letters “N/O’ for “non operational” appeared.

Meteorologist with Environment Canada, Gregg Walters, confirmed that the Bethune radar station was temporarily down, but said he didn’t know why. Walters said they weren't completely in the dark because radar stations to the east and west overlap the area.

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Environment Canada can also watch the data coming from radar sites in Montana and North Dakota. Walters says the severe weather that occurred during the outage wouldn’t have been picked up by that particular radar station.

An email from Environment Canada's head office had more of an explanation as to what happened in Bethune. Of their four satellites that watch Saskatchewan, apparently the one right over Regina had been shutting down since May 13.

On May 25, during a system check, a faulty power connector was discovered and repaired. It had been operating fine since then.

Environment Canada explained that Thursday’s outage was due to a scheduled maintenance.

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